“Don’t,” I mumbled, the sound of my voice nudging me awake.
It had been like that ever since I’d seen Damian at the cemetery two weeks ago—restless nights spent tossing and turning until the sheets ended up in a contorted pile at my feet. Seeing Damian again had set off tiny explosions that left me quaking in their wake. Learning he had bought Casa Paloma, and that Sierra had been spending time with him had come as a bigger aftershock. Being a single mum had always been a challenge, but now I felt both foolish and neglectful for thinking Sierra was going straight home after school, as instructed. The fact that there had been no sign of Damian since The Day of The Dead left me uneasy. On the outside it looked like I had it together, but on the inside I was a complete mess.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
There it was again. That damn sound. Exactly like—
I bolted upright and turned on the bedside lamp.
Damian was sitting on a chair by the foot of my bed, watching me. He didn’t move when the light came on; he just continued tossing peanuts into his mouth. It was impossible to ignore how he owned the space, how he molded it to suit his presence, a palpitation-inducing silhouette from my past, all dressed in black. He might as well have been sitting there all along, all eight years that he was away, because he was there in my head, insinuated in the cracks of my heart. I saw him every day in Sierra’s face, in the strong, white crescents of her nails, in the ends of her hair, that curled up when she twisted her finger around them. I heard him in her bedtime voice, battled him in the stubbornness of her spirit, and felt him in the warmth of her hugs. But pieces of him were nothing compared to the man himself—whole, real and commanding, a thousand suns fused into one, scorching me with his gaze, with whatever emotions were broiling beneath his coal dark eyes.
I clutched the covers to my chest, as if the fabric would keep me from incinerating. I’d always known this day would come, this confrontation, and I’d dreaded it. If there was one thing I knew, it was that you never, ever lock horns with Damian. He had not forgiven my father for taking his mother away. What would he do to me, for keeping his daughter from him?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He put away the paper cone of peanuts he was holding with such calm and precision that goosebumps raced across my skin. For the first time, I noticed the folder on his lap. He opened it, scanned the top sheet, and threw it at me. It fluttered through the air and landed beside me.
Damian didn’t give me the chance to pick it up. He flung another sheet at me, and then another and then another, until they were floating like feathers around me. I grabbed one of them and skimmed over the contents. From the private investigator’s logo on the top, it looked like a report on me: my address, financial records, marital status. I picked up another one. It was a copy of Sierra’s birth certificate. The next one outlined my job, my schedule, my work in Valdemoros. Where I’d been, what I’d done, where I’d lived, my credit card statements, magazine subscriptions—everything and anything pertaining to the last eight years was laid out before me in letter-sized black and white pages.
Damian emptied the entire folder on me. When it was done, and the last sheet flitted to the bed, the fear I’d felt about his reaction was replaced by something else, a sense of outrage that he could presume to stuff everything I’d been through since the island, into one shiny, glossy folder and throw it all in my face.
“You want to know why I didn’t tell you about Sierra?” I asked. “Because this is what you do, Damian.” I scrunched up the papers in my fists. “You research, you plan, you plot your way to vengeance. I had a photo of Sierra when I came to see you in prison. I wanted you to know we had a daughter. My father was gone. I thought there was no one left to fight, but I was wrong. I was wrong, Damian, because you were still fighting. You’re always fighting! You put my father in the grave, but I came anyway, to give you a daughter. But there was no room for us because you were still the same. Still wrestling with your demons. And if you think you know everything there is to know about me from this report, I have news for you. You don’t have a clue, Damian.”